The Biggest Estate on Earth

by Bill Gammage

  The New South Wales Government Botanist Fred Turner identified at least four other grains which ‘developed very much under cultivation’, notably Bull Mitchell Grass, which produced ‘ears nearly 6 inches in length, well filled with a clean-looking, firm grain, which separates easily from the chaff, somewhat like wheat’.73 On Flood’s Creek Sturt found that although ‘the heat was very great, the cereal grasses had not yet ripened their seed, and several kinds had not even developed the flower . . . We found there a native wheat, a beautiful oat, and a rye, as well as a variety of grasses.’74

  For many crops either fire or no fire was essential. Without fire, grass or bracken smothers murnong, but cool, well-timed burns extend its range. People burnt ripe tubers about early summer. This timing would destroy grain coming into head: grain-growing people burnt after the late summer harvest, and as seed was sprouting in autumn or winter—timely smoke increases Native Millet germination from about 8 per cent to 63 per cent.75 ‘In all parts of Australia’, Eyre wrote of Broadleaf Cumbungi, ‘even when other food abounds, the root of this reed is a favourite and staple article of diet.’76 At the right time people burnt cumbungi to improve its taste and fertilise its beds, then cropped and stored it. Timely fire promoted Pituri, Kangaroo Apple, Coconut and Waterbush, and in cycads and Grass Trees it induced more plants, much better fruiting, and concurrent ripening, letting people congregate. It promoted manna, the sweet secretion lerp insects make under eucalypt leaves. Curr wrote, ‘There were bags full of it in almost every camp, and I understood the Blacks to say that they used to set fire to a portion of the mallee every year and gather the manna the next season from the young growth.’77 Timely fire may also explain the seeming absence in 1788 of the biblical-scale bird, insect and mice plagues farmers periodically suffer today (ch 6).78

  Like warran, species were transplanted. In northern South Australia people distributed vine cuttings, and Carpentaria people moved water lilies, though only within the same clan area, otherwise the lilies would not be kin.79 In Victoria Cabbage Palm ‘is the only Palm found wild . . . and legend affirms it was even there introduced by Aborigines’,80 and coastal pigface was traded to the Grampians where it still grows in rock shelters.81 Transplanting is ‘a possible explanation for the discontinuous distribution of bunya pine’.82 At Kungathan on Cape York, 37 edible plant species grew in a 300 x 100 metre patch. It was near camps, distinct from adjacent vegetation, and carefully burnt.83 In north Australia there is a ‘consistent association of edible fruit trees and old camp sites’. People throw tree seeds into litter at camp edges, knowing the compost grows them. ‘All the same gardeny’, one man said. Rhys Jones observed, ‘You can predict a camp by the vegetation . . . [Native Apple] would be growing north of the central casuarina because that is the shade when the fruit is ripe in January . . . dry season fruit trees like Pandanus and Terminalia are to the south of it.’84 Coconuts, figs and shade trees were planted, owned and sometimes protected by clearings.85

  Seed was easily transplanted and traded (ch 5). Bush Tomato, Desert Raisin and other Solanums were traded ‘beyond their normal range’.86 Northeast of Alice Springs, Aruabara

  was not entirely a natural garden. Before the rains came, the local people used fire to promote the growth of some plants. They protected other patches, and seeded the fired patches and some other areas. The seeds, carried in emu feather containers called apwas, were exchanged as gifts at major gatherings. They were scattered near soakage waters or other sites favourable to the particular species.87

  Fiona Walsh argued,

  The introduction of species to sites beyond their ‘normal’ range or habitat may have been a consequence of trade, exchange and storage. Martu stated that plant foods, particularly seeds and fruits, were exchanged at social events and through trade practices. They dried and preserved a range of fruit species for use in the short-term, and cached large quantities of seed and Cyperus bulbosus tubers in anticipation of drought and large meetings.8889

  Many crops were ‘cached’. Tubers last only a few months. Dried fruit stores better, nuts better still. Bunya nuts were put in water or buried in bags, cycads sliced, dried, wrapped in paperbark and buried in 7-metre grass-lined trenches, Quandong, plum and fig strung on sticks or made into cakes, waterlily corms dried and stored.90 Dry seed stores well. Portulaca was wrapped in mud and baked, stored and traded. On the Finke near Mt Charlotte (NT), Christopher Giles

  discovered a native granary. This was a rude platform built in a tree, about 7 or 8 feet from the ground, on this were placed in a heap a number of bags made of close netting. Dismounting, I climbed the tree to examine the bags, and was astonished to find that they contained different kinds of grain, stored up for the winter, or rather the dry season . . . the legs of our [stolen] trousers and the sleeves of our shirts, tied up at each end, [were] filled with seeds.91

  North of Newcastle Waters (NT) Arthur Ashwin

  chanced upon . . . large wooden dishes . . . filled with grass seed as large as rice [Native Rice?] with the husk or the skin on the seed. I think it was a species of rice which grows in the flooded country 40 or 50 miles in extent and north of Newcastle Waters. There must have been about a ton of seed stored there in 17 large dishes, full and all covered with paper-bark. The dishes were nearly all five feet long and a foot deep, scooped out of solid wood.92

  On the ‘flooded country’ Ashwin found six dishes of rice stored in trees and covered with paperbark. He boiled a bagful. It was good: ‘pity we did not take more’, he wrote.93 In central New South Wales Charles Coxen

  found a considerable store of grass-seed, gum from the mimosa, and other stores, carefully packed up in large bags made from the skin of the kangaroo, and covered over with pieces of bark, so as to keep them properly dry. The weight of the bags containing the grass-seed and gum was about one hundred pounds; the seeds had been carefully dried after being collected.94

  Near Milparinka (NSW) Sturt pitied people thrashing wattles for seed,95 and west of the lower Castlereagh he

  found a number of bark troughs, filled with the gum of the mimosa, and vast quantities of gum made into cakes upon the ground. From this it would appear these unfortunate creatures were reduced to the last extremity, and, being unable to procure any other nourishment, had been obliged to collect this mucilaginous food.96

  In time he would suck that gum with relief. Storing was familiar everywhere, not always in response to scarcity. It might be for ceremony, or to stockpile, trade or transplant. On the Carpentaria coast, and as Latz observed of desert people, ‘Stored foods were probably mostly used for ceremonial purposes and do not appear to have played a critical role in tiding people over severe droughts.’9798

  Some researchers see nascent farming in these various practices from tilling to trading.99 Ian Keen suggested that they ‘involved a more radical intervention in the ecology than was recognised earlier’, and Beth Gott remarked, ‘the boundary between foraging and farming is blurred . . . it might be more appropriate to classify Aboriginal subsistence production as that of hunter-gatherer-cultivators’.100 Kimber thought ‘Aborigines had developed a “farming attitude”. Their use of “game and vegetable reserves”, general concepts of culling and conservation of resources, capture of young animals for “hunter-display” pets, and semi-domestication of the dingo, all suggest moves towards farming people.’101 In two important theses Daphne Nash put a strong case for farming. In 1984 she listed examples of every farm practice, detailed how Mt Liebig (NT) women moved plants and spread seed to increase their number and range, and concluded, ‘it is clear that Aborigines are involved in management regimes which stretch the definition of hunting and gathering to include many techniques more commonly associated with agriculture’. By 1993 her Pintupi friends had taught her even more. She titled her thesis ‘Aboriginal Gardening’. For Europeans the difference between a farm and a garden a matter of scale,102 but they are vague on where the two meet: is a market garden a garden or a farm? Nash concluded,


  in hunting and gathering trips, as well as in domestic gardening, people dealt with plants and other resources for social and cultural reasons. They were not solely motivated by biological survival . . . In the bush-gardens, people continued to manage their favoured traditional resources. In both locations, culturally significant species were planted, protected and encouraged in ways that are readily recognised by observers as gardening techniques when used by other cultural groups, but rarely recognised as such in Aboriginal Australia.103

  She supported this with examples of horticulture and agriculture in various parts of Australia, affecting both ‘the entire landscape’ and individual plants like yams, bulbs, cycads, Pituri and Bush Tomato. Nothing was accidental or incidental: people acted deliberately to improve quality and yield.104

  Some researchers puzzle at why people did not ‘go further’, that is, become farmers. Josephine Flood wondered whether people ‘were so affluent that they had no need to increase the yield of food plants . . . There would thus have been no stimulus to increase the food supply by developing agriculture.’105 Harry Allen and Tim Flannery noted that many Australian tubers, seeds, nuts and fruits were ‘closely related to plants domesticated elsewhere in the world’, and Allen saw that the Darling country where some of these foods grew was ‘not more arid or unpredictable than areas where domestication took place’. He thought a ‘hunting and gathering economy rather than an agricultural one may have been the most efficient subsistence strategy for the Darling River Basin, one that enabled them to withstand considerable environmental pressures without any population loss’, but concluded that he did not know why people did not become farmers.106

  Most observers, lay and expert, are adamant that Aborigines were not farmers, and did not farm. Farming peoples attach notions of civilisation, even hierarchies of civilisation, to farming. They think agriculture more civilised and civilising than pastoralism, let alone hunter-gathering. This makes them reluctant to concede that Aborigines farmed. As evidence eroded their initial assumptions and arguments, they put increasingly tougher definition hurdles in the way of what people did in 1788. They began with a simple objection. The land was not disturbed; people had no husbandry and no agriculture. In 1798 Malthus was among the first to sow this seed. Using accounts from New South Wales, he proposed that all populations are limited by their food supply. Hunter-gatherers depend for food on the whims of nature, and this uncertainty deprives them of control over their lives, limits their number, and blocks their road to civilisation. Hunter-gatherers are victims of nature.107

  This wouldn’t do. Clearly people did disturb the land, and did control their food supply, even in Malthus’ terms. Farmers raised the bar. Aborigines did till and toil, but did not farm. ‘In digging up these yams’, AC Gregory observed in 1882, ‘they invariably re-insert the head of the yams so as to be sure of a future crop, but beyond this they do absolutely nothing which may be regarded as a tentative in the direction of cultivating plants.’108 In 1965 Mervyn Hartwig stated of the Arrernte, ‘No attempt is made to grow crops or breed animals, ritual and magic being employed to maintain food-supplies.’109 This assessment reflected the times, but was after Sturt, Eyre, Mitchell and others proved such notions wrong. The prejudice persisted even after Rhys Jones’ brilliant insight on firestick farming incinerated it.110 In 1971 Jones himself wrote,

  Western Desert people do harvest certain staple food-plants, but they do not handle these in a way that closely matches the behaviour of agricultural societies. For example, they possess certain techniques for storing a variety of vegetable foods, but they do not use these techniques to build up surpluses except in times of shortage or extended drought. They do not have any kinds of ‘first fruits’ ceremonies usually associated with agricultural harvests. They do not practice any form of cultivation. And they do not build dams, terraces, or any constructions which might enhance the growth of their wild food resources. Indeed, fire appears to be their only means of taking what we may regard as direct action to encourage the growth of these plants, and present evidence suggests strongly that they are not fully aware of this as an outcome of their burning activity.111

  All this is now disproved, including by Jones, but the standard it demands, ‘the behaviour of agricultural societies’, lingers. In 2000 David Horton stated that Australia was ‘the only continent in which there was no indigenous agriculture’.112 This hinges on his definition of indigenous agriculture. In 1998 Jared Diamond wrote of tuber growers, ‘All that they would have had to do to meet the definition of farmers was to carry the stems and remaining attached tubers home and similarly replace them in soil at their camp.’113 Some did, some didn’t: were all or none farmers thereby?

  The bar went higher. In a thoughtful article in 1995, DE Yen defined farmers not only as managing plants and animals but also as experimenting to improve breeds and strains, thereby excluding Aborigines:

  Had Australian Aborigines invented agriculture independently, the major genetic elements in the systems of the tropical north and its easterly and westerly subtropical coastal extensions might have resembled the taro-yam complex [further north] . . . In over a century of historical observation, ethnography and archaeology, however, there has been no indication of agriculture in the diverse Australian landscapes. That the operational results of foraging techniques can offer striking parallels to agriculture (‘the agronomy of hunter-gatherers’) is really no argument for Aborigines being on some pathway towards cultivation, for domestication of plant species through control of breeding systems and adaptation through modification of the environment, both artificial processes in the human manipulation of the nature-nurture equation, are missing in Australia.114

  People did modify plant environments in 1788, by cultivation and selective burning, while ‘breeding systems’ are not inherent to farming. They simply raise productivity (yield per hectare), usually in response to population increase.

  This population–productivity spiral is critical. In time it obliged farmers to stay put, and in more time made bar-raisers think sedentism integral to farming. ‘A separate consequence of a settled existence’, Diamond declared, ‘is that it permits one to store food surpluses, since storage would be pointless if one didn’t remain nearby to guard the stored food . . . stored food is essential for feeding non-food-producing specialists.’115 In 1788 many people stored, none stayed by their stores, and many who did not store specialised in tool, net and hut making, trade and ritual. ‘Sedentism as a pre-requisite [to farming]’, Yen wrote, ‘remained undeveloped in Aboriginal society as did well-developed hierarchical social systems.’116 About 1822 Berry put both pre-requisites, one directly, the other unconsciously, to a Shoalhaven man:

  I asked him if they could not erect houses for themselves like the men’s huts which would afford them better protection from the weather than a sheet of bark. He replied that they no doubt could do so—and that such Huts would afford them better Shelter—but that it would not suit their mode of life—that it was necessary for them constantly to change their place of residence in search of the means of subsistence and that their means of subsistence had become more scanty since the country had been occupied by white men—that the sheep and cattle eat all the grass in consequence of which Kangaroos had become very scarce—and that they now lived chiefly on squirrels and opossums and such small animals.117

  Berry missed both hints—people did not want to be servants, and they managed kangaroos better than he did. They had no reason to keep within fences.

  They ignored not only Europeans. In the north they knew about farmers. Cape York people traded with Torres Strait gardeners, and Arnhem Landers watched Macassans and Baijini from the Indies till land and plant rice, tamarind and Coconuts, build stone houses, wear cloth, make pottery and feed domestic fowls, dogs and cats. Some visited the Indies.118 None copied either group, instead maintaining typical Australian templates. If anything, people farmed more often beyond the range of these northern groups than within it, and if an
ything, hunter-gathering can as readily be seen as moving north from Cape York as farming moving south.119120

  Many people did live in villages, but most only when harvesting—not, as Berry hoped, to be civilised as cheap labour. The villages best known now were by Victoria’s eel farms. Lake Condah’s stone houses could hold about 700 people, and near Mt William were ‘fixed residences: at one village were thirteen large Huts— they are warm and well constructed . . . O ne Hut measured 10 feet diameter by five feet high, and sufficiently strong for a man on horseback to ride over.’121 People elsewhere built stone houses, and villages were on Hutt and Swan warran templates.122 At Westernport ‘huts form villages of forty or fifty, and one was seen built . . . with a doorway and two windows’.123

  In 1845 Sturt found huts

  made of strong boughs with a thick coating of clay over leaves and grass. They were impervious to wind and rain, and were really comfortable, being evidently erections of a permanent kind to which the inhabitants frequently returned. Where there were villages these huts were built in rows, the front of one house being at the back of the other, and it appeared to be a singular and universal custom to erect a smaller hut at no great distance from the large ones, but we were unable to detect for what purpose they were made, unless it was to deposit their seeds; as they were too small even for children to inhabit.124

  Where Ashwin found stored seed, he

  chanced upon a native encampment of mia-mias, or wurleys, all fenced in with a brush fence . . . There was one large mia-mia, about seven feet high in the middle, and about 16 feet diameter. It was round and arched off to the ground . . . All around this storeroom there were about 50 small mia-mias, or miahs, or gunyahs, as some tribes call them. The fence enclosing the lot was about 200 yards across, and appeared to be kept in order.125

  On the Cooper hut-building ‘was a specialised activity with good builders being in great demand and borrowed from camp to camp’.126 To farmers huts mark sedentism, but on the Cooper mobile specialists built them. Neither in Australia’s richest nor poorest parts, by European standards, were people tempted to settle. Instead they quit their villages and eels, their crops and stores and templates, to walk their country.127